I wish Steve was still there. And I can see why Apple didn't make a big thing of this rollout. Having owned a 2015 MacBook I have to agree that their design peaked then and that was the best MacBook they ever made. Lost in today's announcement is they discontinued that one.

I bought the 2016 model, which I paid $5,000 of my own money for and then $1,200 to repair the keyboard even though it was covered by AppleCare, because I had a lot of faith in Apple at the time. But I hardly use the touch bar, I've never gotten used to the butterfly keyboard so I attach a third-party keyboard, and I didn't like the memory restriction.

So now I get essentially the same keyboard, just quieter, a fix for the memory by buying a whole new laptop, the same touch bar, and somewhat faster processor. I feel sad about saying this, but I'm gonna pass.

Looks like incremental changes to me, nothing special. It should be noticeably faster, partly due to using faster memory. But it's disappointing that they haven't replaced the keyboard with a new design. That would be a showstopper for me, but then I use a ThinkPad, partly because of its keyboard ;).

I just saw a video testing out the i9 version and under sustained load it thermal throttled big time down to 2.2 GHz on average. This could be a big deal for video rendering or large imports/exports in Lightroom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx8J125s4cg

That is an excellent point. However, I would speculate that very few people would buy such a keyboard for a couple of reasons:

1. It would have to be wired. I just don’t see how a wireless keyboard even with a large battery would last long enough before having to be recharged.

2. The price would be too much to ask for many. Building in the touch bar and the fingerprint sensors (which in my opinion is the most useful feature) would add a significant cost. I would speculate that it would have to be sold for more than $300 to just break even the development and marketing costs.

This statement could be a whole conversation: the Apple Touchbar is a gimmick.

It lacks haptic feedback. It literally takes more time to change volume and screen brightness because of the Touchbar's gimmicky touch UI. And I have to look down every time I change the volume or hit escape because I can't feel for the physical position of those key. And sometimes when it crashes (because it has its own ARM processor), I loose the escape key, and have to restart the machine.

I think most people (not including myself or some of you), no longer demand big performance increases in their Macs because you can do so much in a web browser and on the iPhone. And even if they want better performance every year, battery and cooling capacities are becoming the more significant limiting factor. Battery tech just can't keep up.

Gimmicks like the Touchbar are Apple's attempt to increase the Mac's value proposition. It's kinda like 3D touch on the iPhone -- who really needs it?

As a newcommer to Cake, i'm not sure if this is an effective way to respond to the two replies of my post about the touch bar. But here goes . . . . .

If one concludes that the touch bar is a gimmic, inappropriate for "desktop" machines, then what do we conclude? Here are some possibles:

1) Apple have "lost their way" and are moving away from quality tech to the high-end jewelery market.

2) The touch bar is the prelude to a fully "soft" keyboard. Of course the battery life issues apply here - but to my mind there is no real problam in having a wired keyboard for a desktop machine. But perhaps I'm a dinosaur.

To be clear - I'm not obsessing about the touch bar. What I am really concerned about is the general future trajectory for Mac-OS machine.

Apple have "lost their way" and are moving away from quality tech to the high-end jewelery market.

Great insight!

Perhaps they are making decent machines that no one wants to buy because their 3-year-old machine is good enough? It's could be it's just harder to get people to pay up for a new Mac every couple of years, and Apple is experimenting to see what gets people to buy.

Anyway I just bought the new Macbook Pro for programming purposes. I upgraded from a 2011. When I first got it a was skeptical but, then fell in love with the speed of it, keyboard and display. And I thought the lack of ports would bother me but too be honest I was able to adapt. The battery life lasts all day for me and I put it on heavy load (xcode, webstorm, web browser, and file server). I think it was a bit expensive (especially as a broke high school student) but I love it so far.